Every inch of the Canada-U.S. border should be under “operational control” of American border officials, a U.S. lawmaker told congress.

WASHINGTON—Every inch of the Canada-U.S. border and the American boundary with Mexico should be under “operational control” of American border officials, a U.S. lawmaker told a congressional hearing into border security on Tuesday.

“The acceptable level for the American citizen is total control of our southern border, our northern border, our natural ports of entry,” said Republican Jeff Duncan, a South Carolina lawmaker and a member of the House of Representatives Subcommittee on border and maritime security.

Such control would allow Americans to protect “this beacon of freedom,” Duncan said, “where we determine who comes into this country, how many folks come here through legal means annually, what they come for, whether they’re seeking citizenship.”

Duncan was one of several lawmakers who peppered Michael Fisher, the border patrol chief of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, on the true meaning of “operational control” following a recent congressional report that found only a small fraction of the Canada-U.S. border was being adequately monitored by American officials.

The startling report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, was released just days before U.S. President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Stephen Harper signed a recent agreement to share more information on travellers and to better coordinate cross-border investigations.

The framework agreement could lead to a North American security perimeter in the years to come.

In the days since the GAO report was released, the term “operational control” has become a border security catchphrase on Capitol Hill, particularly given its assertions that Islamic terrorists were more likely to enter the U.S. through Canada than via Mexico.

Homeland security czar Janet Napolitano even scoffed at the term last week during her own appearance before the committee, referring to “operational control” as a “very narrow term of art.”

“It does not reflect the infrastructure and technology and all the other things that happen at the border,” she tersely told Candice Miller, the Michigan Republican who chairs the subcommittee.

Fisher reiterated that assertion in his opening statement to the hearing, saying the term does not “accurately represent the Border Patrol’s significant investments in personnel, technology, and resources” or the efforts of other Homeland Security partners involved in patrolling America’s borders, including the U.S. Coast Guard.

“The Border Patrol is currently taking steps to replace this outdated measure with performance metrics that more accurately depict the state of border security,” he said.

Fisher also suggested to Duncan that putting both borders under total control of U.S. officials wouldn’t work.

“Part of our overall vision is to substantially increase the probability of apprehension of those people that seek to do harm to this country,” he said, noting the U.S. had spent US$3 billion on each border in the past fiscal year.

But building fences along portions of either border, for example, wouldn’t necessarily stop people from flooding into the United States, Fisher said.

“There are still going to be those individuals that are going to try to go over it, go underneath it or go around it,” he said, pointing to the need, instead, for better intelligence-sharing and new technologies on both borders.

Richard Stana, the director of homeland security and justice for the Government Accountability Office, said America’s security challenges along the 6,400-kilometre northern border are far different than those plaguing the U.S.-Mexico boundary, and have more to do with intelligence-sharing among various agencies in both the U.S. and Canada.

“It’s a different solution that’s required on the northern border than the southern border; you don’t have hundreds of thousands of economic migrants coming south for the opportunities for employment,” he said.

“It’s not so much having a whole string of agents slinging arms, because that would be a waste of time and money; it’s making sure that everybody knows what their roles and responsibilities are, they stay in their lanes, they coordinate, co-operate and share.”

Nonetheless, that hasn’t stopped a handful of American senators from asking for the military’s help in patrolling the expansive boundary.

Democratic senators from states located near or along the Canada-U.S. border have asked the U.S. Department of Defense to provide military radar in an effort to nab drug traffickers who use low-flying aircraft to move their product from Canada into the United States.

Businesses on both sides, on the other hand, have complained for years about a “thickening” of the border in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, saying increasing red tape hindered trade and significantly slowed down the free flow of goods and services.

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